02/07/2017

Rebranding Zix: Letting Our Customers Be Our Guide

As a marketing professional, I notice a common challenge for mature companies: how do we evolve our brand to stay relevant without jeopardizing relationships with existing, long-term customers?

It’s a challenge that my team at Zix knows all too well. Zix is an almost 20-year-old email data protection provider, with fiercely loyal customers. Our customers are major players in some of the most traditionally conservative, highly regulated industries: banking, healthcare, government, legal, among others.

In recent years, cybersecurity stories have dominated the headlines. Over the past six months alone, we have witnessed the DNC, John Podesta and Colin Powell all fall victim to email hacks. As email threats became more and more sophisticated, Zix’s products and services evolved to provide even better protection, and we wanted our brand to better reflect this modernization.

How were we able to progress our brand while still championing our federally regulated customers? The answer: a four-pronged research approach, in addition to the support of our leadership team and employee base.

Modernizing the Zix brand

Zix announced its rebrand today, including a branding change from the 15-year-old ZixCorp to Zix and a new corporate identity as the gold standard in email encryption — a testament to Zix’s best-in-class email encryption services.

In order to preserve our current relationships and keep a sense of consistency for our brand, the team has updated our look and feel, while sticking with major themes. For example, the rebrand includes a fresh take on the Zix logo, using a modern font.

In addition to our familiar blue, we have added gold to our color scheme to reflect our customers’ view of our solutions. We’ve complemented the blue and gold with a new lighter shade of blue.

We’ve also added new messaging to showcase Zix as the best-in-class email encryption solution and home to a team of cybersecurity experts. Second to none, our customers rely on us to protect them today and trust us to evolve our solutions to meet their demands tomorrow.

How we did it

None of this would have been possible without the energy, enthusiasm and interest of our new CEO Dave Wagner.

Dave joined the company in January 2016 and immediately challenged us to modernize, evolve and further simplify the brand. Dave was clear that he wanted a brand evolution not a brand revolution. After all, he has been a Zix fan for years and knew it would be wise to build on the existing reputation. With the leadership team’s support, we wanted a progressive brand identity to energize customers, employees and partners.

The Zix team began working with global creative agency RAPP on the rebrand strategy process in June 2016. The process was driven by four main pillars of research, including analysis of customer perspectives, competition, cultural trends and internal stakeholders. The area of research that informed our direction most significantly was, without a doubt, the voice of the customer. Notably, our customers were not only satisfied with Zix, but they were big-time fans. It was the Zix customer base that spoke the loudest about their view of Zix as the gold standard for email encryption.

We also conducted qualitative and quantitative research via phone and web surveys with nearly 1,000 IT decision-makers, security and compliance professionals and IT administrators. With the research phase complete, we fired up gyro as our brand activation partner. Gyro has delivered a best in class website that perfectly combines our new style with functionality that better serves customers, prospects and other visitors.

This has been a rewarding and invigorating process. We could not be more thrilled to unveil the new Zix identity. While we’re excited about where we are as a Company, we’re even more excited about where we’re going. Keep an eye on Zix. 2017 is going to be an exciting year.

If you’d like to check out our rebrand, please navigate our website or check out this video from our CEO Dave Wagner. Alternatively, you can check us out on our Twitter and LinkedIn pages.